Yes, it’s one of those reviews, sorry.
📍King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 WED 25 MAY TO SAT 28 MAY 2022
🕖 7.30pm | Matinee Sat 2pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 2 hours 50 minutes (incl. interval)
👥 Based on the novel by: Emily Brontë
👥 Adapted & Directed by: Emma Rice
👥 Composer: Ian Ross
👥 Set & Costume Designer: Vicki Mortimer
💰 From £23
🎂 12+
🎭 Captioned
🎭 Audio Description & BSL – Sign Language Interpreted : Sat 28 May 2.00PM
🎭 Touch Tours: Sat 28 May 1.00PM
Infrequently, and still too regularly, a critic sits down to write a review fit to please no-one. Not himself, and certainly not those who created the piece being critiqued; this is one of those times.
Emily Brontë’s immortal gothic novel has, since publication broken the hearts of the unwary reader, and left many permanently shaped by the experience. A story of the destructive power of obsessive “love”, it towers over the genre which followed after, ever seeking to capture that same dark magic, yet never quite doing so.
Thus it comes as some surprise that Emma Rice’s take on the story is one prone to shouty melodrama, and by the second act, nigh-panto farce. Yes, like the bleakest of Shakespearian tragedy, the source text allows itself a sprinkle of light-relief, but if Brontë’s masterpiece is anything, it is not silly.
To the uninitiated, Wuthering Heights is a story told in orbit around the all-consuming obsession binding Heathcliff (Liam Tamne) and Catherine (Lucy McCormick), and the wasteland wrought of those unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Paired as children, through Heathcliff’s adoption by Catherine’s kindly father, farmer of Wuthering Heights, the two roam the West Yorkshire moors together, twin-souled avatars of nature’s wild excess. Their idyll crashes about them on their father’s death, and the ascendancy of oldest brother Hindley (Tama Phethean), who beats Heathcliff into uneducated servitude. This leaves Catherine to choose between penury with her soulmate, and financial security with the amorous, kindly, if soft Edgar Linton, owner of stately Thrushcross Grange.
Heathcliff swears darkest revenge on all who would separate him from his Catherine, and akin to Dumas’ Edmond Dantès (The Count of Monte Cristo), flees into exile, only to return years later to visit misery on the man who married his Catherine; the brother who abused him; their families; and indeed anyone he holds responsible for the sundering of his soul.
On stage, the narrative beats of the story are all in place, faithfully enacted according to the novel’s lengthy timeline, as is much of the originating text. About it, Rice intertwines a medley of mostly folky, and well-orchestrated musical numbers thanks to composer Ian Ross. Nandi Bhebhe is particularly excellent as the play’s chorus-esque Leader of the Moor. Her twiggy crowned embodiment of nature is a study in vocal excellence, and dominant stage presence.
The tonal dissonance emerges early however, though less emphatically in the first act, than second. Whilst the chorus sing of dark fates, and a treacherous moor, the stage is rarely in want of a clown. Whilst comedy is the mirror to tragedy — and not absent from the novel — farce is another matter altogether. Time lost to amusing diversions is too regularly time lost to nuanced character development.
The warning signs appear early when Wuthering Heights is first introduced through the eyes of Lockwood (Sam Archer), the somewhat inept new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, upon his first visit with his new landlord, Heathcliff. Now owner of both properties, Heathcliff’s vengeances appears complete, but Catherine now lies in her grave, and with her, his soul.
Now, the comic contrast betwixt the solemn, entirely self-possessed Heathcliff and the rather witless Lockwood is a valid device, but when his foolery leads to a most mundane, noisome, and not in the least atmospheric encounter with Catherine’s ghost at his bedroom window, that touch of gothic horror which attended Brontë’s pen is lost, and never recovered.
The fatal blows to the play’s narrative integrity, however, only commence with the return of Archer as Linton, and his sister Isabella (Katy Owen). Though the former will achieve some gravitas in the second act, attending to his impending demise, both are mostly caricatures of gentile inanity, the latter particularly so. This strand of silliness is dialled to 11 in the second act when Owen swaps hats to play Heathcliff’s fragile son, offering the audience nigh pantomime-realness. This absurdity of a creature, we are asked to believe, as a valid object of a rational woman’s affections.
All the while Tamne’s Heathcliff strides the stage, an unequivocal engine of brutality and spite, the passions which attended the character before the intermission now boiled away to leave a fairly one-dimensional villain. Farce, and violent misogyny make for very odd bed-fellows to say the least; and all the while the band keep playing, and the jokes keep coming.
A good deal of the silliness is genuinely funny, well acted, and draws upon no little talent for physical comedy from several of the players. It’s almost as if there are two plays happening simultaneously: a competently portrayed, rather bleak love story which finishes in act 1, and an odd comedy inspired by Wuthering Heights which lingers on to the end.
Further the play is rich in production qualities. Indeed, as an upbeat, Folk-musical, in pursuit of a more suitable intellectual property, it would be rather excellent. Composer Ian Ross provides well orchestrated, and tuneful fuel for a tight, on-stage band led by Nadine Lee. The cast do everything but chew the scenery to deliver Rice’s vision, McCormick in particular a febrile mind, perpetually teetering on the edge of madness, a mess of tears, laughter, and screaming catastrophe.
Etta Mufitt has the cast drilled into a finely choreographed unit, and there’s an air of quality to each musical set-piece. Further, Vicki Mortimer’s set is a suitably grand, and paired back affair, populated with simple, effective props, and loomed over by Simon Baker’s videos of lowering skies. Being able to watch the backstage crew facilitate the admittedly high-octane show was a singular pleasure, and they deserved both their curtain call and hearty applause.
Wuthering Heights is a good folk-musical, and it is even “an epic story of love, revenge and redemption” as promised by its promotional material. As an adaptation, however, it simply strays too far from the spirit of the original. No tale need be preserved in aspic, but to depart so far from the tone of its inspiration, so that comedy threatens to outbalance everything else, is simply an odd choice.
The abundant talent on show might easily have created a fabulous new musical, one which this critic would most likely have loudly applauded. Further, it’s entirely likely that theatre-goers unfamiliar, or less enamoured with Brontë’s work, will be roundly entertained. It’s unsurprising that at the same performance from which this review stems, a good proportion of the audience offered a standing ovation. No doubt they left buoyed and full of beans, happily discussing this new, cheerful, all-singing, all-dancing production. Yes, the production might still seem a bit of a tonal muddle, but much can be forgiven in the face of the sheer quality of a show birthed by Wise Children, The National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, and York Theatre Royal.
Unfortunately, from this critic’s point of view, so long as the play is entitled, Wuthering Heights, there is no escape from comparison with the source text, and rightly so, given the cache, and public notice borrowed from the novel’s looming place in the English-speaking cultural awareness. During exams, many is the time a student will write an excellent response to a question, only to find their carefully crafted text scored through with red pen, accompanied by the words, “not the question you were asked,” or similar. This same phenomenon, it appears has struck once again
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